Imogen could have gone for some hot chocolate, or just a cup of water, but she didn’t want to ask and draw the wrong kind of attention to herself. Instead, there was something she wanted to focus on while Gale was in a reflective mood. Maybe this could become the “campfire” chat they’d discussed that morning.
“Can I just say, while you all sip your coffee…” Beck, Tilda, and Gale gave her their attention, but she spoke to Gale. “We’re more similar than we are dissimilar.”
Tilda squinted, dubious. Beck slurped, looking at Gale over the rim of her mug, studying his reaction. Gale gave Imogen a pointed but jocular glare. It was hard to maintain eye contact with him, but she forced herself to stay connected.
“That so?” He oozed doubt.
“Yes.”
“You see yerself in me? ’Cause I don’t see myself in you.”
That threw her off for a second, but she didn’t let it undermine her mission. He was right that their superficial similarities were minimal. “It’s something deeper, inside—not about where we were born, or the specifics of how we grew up and what we became. It’s more like…we’ve reached a place where we know we want something different than what we have. But at some point you have to make peace with what you can do versus what you wish you could do. That’s how you stop feeling cheated by what you thought your life would be, versus the life you actually end up living. And it’s hard, life is hard, even for the people who make it look easy.” She tried not to look at her sister, but her eyes drifted to her anyway.
“Everybody feels…maybe they’re disappointed, for a time. But the thing that’s harder to accept, to get over…is feeling like no one really gets you. Like there’s some fundamental part of you that isn’t understood.” This time she looked at Tilda. “And that’s what makes people feel lonely, makes them doubt everything else, even if your life looks great from the outside.”
She hoped he grasped even a tiny bit of what she was trying to say; it was a difficult thing to express, and she didn’t think she’d said it well.
Gale was still in a joking mood. “And everybody laughs in the same language blah blah blah and enjoys a good shit and a good fuck. That yer point?”
It kind of was, but she felt him deflecting. Maybe she’d approached it all wrong, too vaguely, or maybe no one had ever tried to have an intimate conversation with him. “It’s not bullshit.”
“So you know me—that yer point?”
“Not very well. But maybe we have more in common than you think, in spite of how different our lives are. And from what I’ve seen…you’re an interesting person.”
Gale snorted. He spooned out hearty portions into their three bowls and the dead man’s plate, which he seemed to prefer. He’d made too much again, even more than last time, and it was obvious he didn’t care about rationing. Did that portend they’d all leave the Canyon at some point, or that none of them would? Imogen remembered the two of them refilling the canteens at Boucher Creek. He’d talked about poison. A nice big meal. A last meal. A peaceful drop into a never-ending sleep.
Had the dead man possessed something that Gale could have slipped into their food?
“She’s a book writer?” he asked Beck, who nodded in confirmation. He turned back to Imogen. “That’s nice a you wanting to think well a me, but doll, you ain’t living in the real world.”
The jab hurt. She’d always considered her imagination an asset as an author, while fearing that her lack of life experience would eventually show. She didn’t think it was wrong to analyze things deeply, or find commonalities between diverse or disparate individuals. And it wasn’t as if she’d never visited the real world; it intruded on her fantasy life more than she preferred.
“I know everything about the real world.” She spoke with such solemnity that they all looked at her, as if not quite sure who she was.
“Serve ’em up!” Gale held out the bowls and Imogen distributed them.
She sat back down carefully, afraid of another dizzy spell; hungry, she didn’t want to spill her food. Before she started to eat, she studied Gale, still concerned that he might have added something to the dinner pouches. Should she warn Beck and Tilda? But even if the dead man had been carrying medications—prescription or otherwise—they hadn’t seen Gale grind up any pills. The only other toxic things Imogen could think of were the fuel and fire-starter, and surely they would add a noxious flavor to everything. Gale ate with casual gusto, and Tilda and Beck, though watchful for other reasons, ate without wavering. And without grimacing at a bad taste.
“It’s real beautiful out here.” Gale chewed and looked around. “It’s funny, all that hard work to get down that damn trail, but here it’s easier and nobody comes.”
“Too inaccessible for most people,” said Beck. “And for a lot of people…the Canyon trails are really exposed, a lot of cliff edges. Like you said, it’s too hard for casual hikers or tourists.”
He nodded, his focus lingering on the astonishing horizon. The painted stripes of endless rock. Perhaps the formations had been sharp and jagged in their infancy, but age had blurred them, creating stone phantoms that rippled with the light. “Glad I got to see this.”
“Beauty. Should add that to your list,” Imogen said. He scrunched half his face into a question. “With shitting and fucking—your words. Everybody appreciates beauty. Sometimes we find it in different places. Sometimes not.”
He aimed his fork at her. “Know what yer doing. Getting all psychological. But I already see what I see and know what I know.”
“I know you aren’t heartless, Gale.” She didn’t want to give up—couldn’t give up.
“Selfish, though.” He shrugged, looked away again. “Selfish as fuck. You’d understand everything better if you remembered that.”
It sounded part warning, part apology.
Beck stopped chewing. Damn, her sister cogitated loudly, even when words weren’t spoken; she’d heard only the warning, and reached an instantaneous conclusion. Imogen scrutinized Gale, which was easier to do with his attention focused on the landscape. Tilda, absorbed in her meal, wasn’t really paying attention, or parsing words like the Blum sisters. It took Imogen a moment to dig down to the bottom layer of what he really meant.
Selfish as fuck. You’d understand everything better if you remembered that.
Her sister cut to his truth like a surgeon. Imogen had to stop looking for the soft parts, the distracting things that made her see him as a fellow human. She tried harder to put herself in his shoes. What would she do if she was selfish as fuck? She certainly wouldn’t waste an ounce of compassion—or anything else—on someone like Gale. He would be as meaningless, his life as worthless, as…She looked at her spoon. Her bowl. And wondered for the first time if he even differentiated living things from the inanimate. Did any of it matter, to someone who was selfish as fuck? A living backpacker or a dead one, they were just stuff. Stuff he needed, stuff he wanted. His personal doctor and little assistant. The curvy girl he liked to ogle.
And then she knew. She saw the sparklers and heard the cherry bombs. She felt the juices dripping down her fingers as she gnawed the rib bones, hot off the grill. She saw, through his eyes, his family, his people, his children. And she knew: no one else mattered.
Beck didn’t matter. Tilda didn’t matter. She didn’t matter.
Had never mattered.
Were never going to matter.
Selfish.
Everything he did was to serve his own needs.
Selfish.
They would never sway him from his course. He didn’t care about promises. He didn’t care if Beck’s child was short one mother—he might say it was a shame, but it wouldn’t impact his decisions.
Selfish.
Now she heard it everywhere. In the whistling sound the wind made. In the beating of a raven’s wing. In the rustling grasses that lined the creek. The creek itself all but screamed it, a cascade of warnings to listen, listen, listen. How had she not heard it before?
She’d been a fool, a dreamer, to believe reason and compassion would turn him around. She’d been duped by his apparent complexity. Or had it only been her desire to see him that way? Her wishful delusions had so preoccupied her that she hadn’t seen Gale for what he was: a man so enamored of his own privilege that no one else, ultimately, mattered.
Every moment of his life was more important than anyone else’s.
Everything he desired superseded even her—or Beck’s, or Tilda’s—right to live.
Beck had advised them the previous night to be ready, to think about what you don’t want to lose. But even then Imogen hadn’t heard the subtext: Be selfish. Finally Imogen realized that she couldn’t save anyone else until she was selfishly, irrevocably committed to saving herself. It was fine to believe she had a purpose for being here—here, now, with Gale. And equally fine to have empathy for his heroic worldview. But it would come to nothing—she would accomplish nothing—until she viewed her journey the way he viewed his, as the only thing that mattered.
I wasn’t all in before. Gale had seen that—that was the real reason he’d made her his dutiful servant.
She’d wanted to believe in a goodness in him that wasn’t there. Anne Frank had done that, but believing that people are really good at heart hadn’t kept her from dying at Bergen-Belsen. Imogen often thought of young Anne, and the tragic irony that her physical life had expired but the fragile pages she’d written in pencil lived on. How had Imogen been willing, for so long, to accept the microscopic degrees of Gale’s humanity? Stupid fucking cow. Things had gone so far because she was weak.
Gale wasn’t wrong when he said she didn’t live in the real world. Even her most recent book was about a woman raped by a ghost, not an actual man. But she was right too: she knew more than she cared to about the real world. He would never shed his demon layer, but Imogen could still slough off the useless parts of herself.
Feral with energy, she gobbled up the rest of her meal.